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Resident dishes on life in Vancouver’s first cohousing development

Two years in: Consensus building, shared space and four group meals a week

Naoibh O’Connor / Vancouver Courier JANUARY 19, 2018 10:54 AM

Ericka Stephens-Rennie and her son Jacob, four, spend time together in their unit in the Vancouver Cohousing complex in East Van. Photo Dan Toulgoet

Almost two years ago, residents of the city’s first cohousing development — Vancouver Cohousing — moved in. Located in Kensington-Cedar Cottage on East 33rd near Argyle Street, the building, which took years to develop, features 31 units. While residents own their own strata units, they also operate collaboratively to maintain the building and have strong social relationships reinforced through shared meals several times a week.

We caught up with one of the residents, Ericka Stephens-Rennie, to find out what life has been like in the close-knit community. She lives in a two-bedroom home within the complex with her husband and two children. Continue story

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Residents buy the units similar to a condo strata (only three are still available), but opt to live in a close-knit community where decisions are made by consensus. While they take turns cooking about three communal meals each week, each unit comes with a private kitchen.

“This is a damn good idea,” Vision Vancouver Coun. Kerry Jang said at the groundbreaking. “It’s a great use of land, it’s a very sensitive amount of density and it reduces costs.”

Jang championed the project as an innovative way to deal with some of Vancouver’s problems, including the prevailing sense of loneliness in the city revealed in a Vancouver Foundation report that found residents lack a sense of community.

Although the units aren’t cheap, living is more affordable with shared office space and built-in babysitters, he said.

“It’s not for everybody but for the people it works for let’s do it,” he said, adding it’s part of the housing mix that can keep young people in the city. (There will be more than a dozen children living in the development when it’s ready in about 14 months.)

After thousands of hours of volunteer work and a marathon public hearing to rezone the land, future resident Darcy Riddell was thrilled to see construction start.

“It’s been a long haul. It’s really exciting,” she said.

While some neighbours didn’t like the idea of additional density on the street – the most opposed neighbour sold his house – Riddell said the cohousing community is excited to welcome the rest of the neighbourhood once it’s built. They plan to host potlucks, use their courtyard as a performance space and will even have a yoga room.

City Breaks Ground on Vancouver’s First Cohousing Project

Today saw the official groundbreaking for Vancouver’s first cohousing complex, being built on East 33rd near Argyle Street in Kensington Cedar-Cottage.

Construction is expected to take 14 months. The complex will be made up of four separate residential buildings and a communal “clubhouse” with a community kitchen and dining room, activity rooms for children and teenagers, office areas, guest rooms, a yoga studio and a rooftop garden. There will be also ground-level gardens, workshops, courtyard and a play area to encourage year-round social contact, according to Vancouver Cohousing.

The 31 homes will range from studios to one-, two-, three- and four-bedroom units – all with their own kitchens.

Three units remain unsold: a 450- square-foot studio at $286,080, a 1,055-square-foot three-bedroom unit at $622,485, and a 1,146-square-foot three-bedroom unit at $682,393. Negotiations are ongoing for two covenanted rental suites.

Brian Jackson, the city’s manager of planning and development, attended the groundbreaking to acknowledge the hard work that went into the seeing the project realized.

Jackson said that he had worked with planners to find creative ways to ensure community concerns were addressed, with the applicants to make sure that the city was responding to the unique circumstances of this type of development, and that city staff had toured a cohousing complex in Burnaby to learn more about how successful cohousing works.

REW.ca’s sister newspaper Vancouver Courier has taken a closer look at the project and its future residentshere.

Cohousing in Vancouver: Living outside the box

When I was younger, I shared a Brooklyn brownstone with several friends (and, later, strangers) in a collective-housing experiment that had gone horribly right. 11 people shared three full flats and a half-finished basement. The basement had no kitchen. My flat had no door. I would routinely find our basement-dweller midway through a pack of snack crackers as I came home from work. She’d look up, wide-eyed like a raccoon caught in the act of ransacking a kitchen.

Kensington-Cedar Cottage: Cohousing coming to the neighbourhood

Last March, the city approved a rezoning proposal to allow for the cohousing complex to be constructed on three properties on East 33rd Avenue near Argyle Street. Design details have not been finalized yet. Rendering courtesy of Ankenman Marchand

Ericka Stephens-Rennie was raised in small-town Rossland, B.C. “That life was really appealing to me — the idea that you knew all your neighbours,” she told the Courier. “I grew up sharing toys with my neighbours. My dad shared tools with the neighbours. Canning in the summertime and neighbourhood block parties were a reality of my life. I’ve always lived in big cities since moving away from home and was looking at a way to establish that again.”